The Snowball Principle

Write of Passage started as eleven Zoom calls with a few dozen students. Three years later, we're a team of 38 people delivering 150+ hours of live sessions to 364 students. We have fourteen alumni Mentors that each design and deliver their own weekly sessions. Our twelve Editors just provided in-depth writing feedback to over 250 article drafts in less than a week. Mentor and Editor programs are robust cohorts-within-the-cohorts, all with their own applications, training, compensation, and feedback systems.

But these groups had humble beginnings. The Mentor and Editor programs started as sticky notes:

• The first Mentor program was six alums on a Zoom call, 24 hours before course launch

• The first Editor program was five volunteers in a WhatsApp thread

When building a course, each new feature is a tiny snowball you push down a hill. Some melt, never catching on. But other snowballs work! Students love them. They keep rolling and growing beween cohorts, until one day they're core building blocks for your program.

Course building consists of pushing small snowballs down hills, watching them roll, and focusing on the ones that grow. All great course components start as tiny snowballs. If you're building a course, don't aim for perfection in your first cohort. It's ok to start small. To build a great online course, start by pushing snowballs.